Border topologies: The time-spaces of labour migrant regulation

Abstract

Labour migrants seeking work and employment increasingly find themselves having to negotiate an ambiguous migrant status that leaves them neither fully included, nor fully excluded, from a political community. Of late, there has been a recognition that such ambiguity arises as much from temporal as spatial border management practices. Rather than consider time and temporality as integral to the distorted spatiality of contemporary political borders, however, the tendency has been to treat the former as a supplement to the latter. In this paper, we set out to show how time and space work through one another to place migrant workers partly on the 'inside', partly on the 'outside', by selectively combining their pre-and post-entry experiences. In order to make sense of this series of temporal and spatial entanglements, we advance a particular topological reading that aims to show how complex migrant positions are produced and maintained by bringing the times before and after the border into play as part of what enables governments to include and exclude labour migrants in a more differentiated manner. Such regulated time-spaces, of which we outline two, indefinite exclusion and suspended inclusion, in our view, offer a more accurate account of the ways in which migrant workers are simultaneously included and excluded.

Social geography I: Time and temporality

“…Referring to the labour migration of low-skilled seasonal agricultural workers and highly skilled intra-company transferees, Allen and Axelsson (2019) draw attention to how holding temporary visas leads such migrants to undertake circular migration that precludes them from qualifying for longer-term settlement (i.e. indefinite exclusion).…”

Punctuated temporalities: Temporal borders in student-migrants’ everyday lives

“…The temporality of migration from the point of view of student migration and migration conceptualised as skilled migration is more limited in extent. Recent contributions have provided insights into migrant nurses’ experiences of waiting in Norway (Vaughn et al, 2019), highly skilled professionals’ waiting for residence permits and their temporary loss of mobility in Sweden (Allen and Axelsson, 2019; Axelsson, 2017), and the interrupted academic careers of Chinese academic returnees (Wang, 2019). Moreover, the lived experiences of time among student-migrants in Sweden (Nilsson Folke, 2018), the experienced arrhythmia of educated precarious migrant youth in southern Europe (Marcu, 2017) and the shaping of life and work experiences of temporary student-migrants through visa categorisations in an Australian context have been examined (Robertson, 2013, 2014; Robertson and Runganaikaloo, 2014).…”

Status (Im)Mobility and the Legal Production of Irregularity: A Sociolegal Analysis of Temporary Migrants’ Lived Experiences

“…Even in Canada and Australia, there is a policy shift away from the settler society paradigm towards greater temporary admissions (Dauvergne, 2016; Mares, 2016; Nakache and Dixon-Perera, 2015; Robertson, 2014). Since the authorisation to enter and reside on the territory of destination countries is valid for a predetermined duration, continuous presence is conditional, and inclusion within society is suspended (Allen and Axelsson, 2019). Upon admission, migrants are allowed to remain temporarily in the host country, turning permanent residency into the outcome of prolonged immobility and temporariness (Della Torre and De Lange, 2018).…”

“…2 (Lisette, interview extract, January 2017)Lisette’s narrative and her experience of temporariness and legal constraints raise the question of inclusion and integration of immigrants in the host societies. As argued by Allen and Axelsson (2019) using the concept of ‘suspended inclusion’, since migrants’ presence is increasingly conditional and constructed temporarily, their inclusion within the host society is suspended in time. In fact, legal status affect migrants’ paths towards integration in a variety of ways as it plays a significant role in areas that are fundamental to integration such as employment, higher education or health.…”